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Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

bbc.com

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Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#421

Post by Aleksdev »

nimbius wrote: post #25
jmann99999 wrote: post #5

If this BBC story doesn't indicate that there is an overreaction to new Twitter management, I don't know what will. It reminded me of when I was considering trying to move all of our customers to receive PGP encrypted mail in 2005. An intelligent employee brought up that an average business person would never do that. Luckily we never implemented it. Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much…

>there is an overreaction to new Twitter management Oh i think its a perfectly legitimate and reasonable reaction to new Twitter management. a guy worth about 200bn USD spent his first day at the office dragging a piece of plumbing around cheerleading his impending job cuts and upcoming $8 surcharge for a feature that only really benefits and legitimizes the platform. he then axes most of the company, especially the…

Your post comes off as extremely negative towards Musk. I’m going to get downvoted for saying this but let’s be honest for a minute.

There were multiple videos titled something like “a day in the life of a twitter employee” were they employees at twitter documented how they drank alcohol and “chilled” on the roof after a few meetings. This doesn’t seem like work to me.

Second, the moderation team at twitter covered up the Hunter Biden laptop story because they had a bias. I don’t think they were doing a great job.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#422

Post by rem7 »

audessuscest wrote: post #11

For most people it means trusting unknown people with their data and trusting them to not delete your account or turn off the instance eventually, which doesn't make it really better than twitter. Ideally everyone should run its own instance but it won't be the case.

How’s that different from trusting Twitter? You can export your data everyday and back it up if you want. Move to another server and restore.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#423

Post by mplewis »

phpisthebest wrote: post #410
frereubu wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's that simple is it? Companies like Ford don't advertise on sites like Parler not just because there aren't many people there, but because of the content that their adverts would be presented alongside. What seems to concern companies about the new direction of Twitter is that more extremists may be allowed back on Twitter if the content rules are loosened, and the companies' advertising may be prese…

As a Life long F150 owner (having owned 5 of one from each of the last 5 generations including my current one... all V8's as well, Ecoboost V6 is a terrible engine and does not belong in a truck ;) ), and a person that lives in a Red State, and a person that Knows alot of other F150 owners.. I can assure you the people screeching about twitters new ownership are not Fords Customer base. Ford's bread and butter is the…

You have a very skewed view of who’s buying the F150 and who they’re selling the Lightning to.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#424

Post by darawk »

BryantD wrote: post #245
darawk wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many rich people and fund managers around the world have been throwing money at engineers they thought were smart for the past several decades? How many have succeeded on the scale Elon has? "Throwing money at smart engineers" is not a novel idea. Executing it well is extremely hard, especially when cash has been cheap for the past two decades.

Do you know the NFL betting scam? It's awesome. Here's how it works. You choose 1024 people, and you send all of them a prediction about one upcoming sports game, free of charge. 50% get one prediction, 50% get the other. Next week, you have 512 people who think you can guess pretty good. You pick another game. 256 people get one prediction, 256 get the other. The following week, 256 people think you got two in a row…

I'm aware of this scheme. But I don't think you understand why it works. Track records are absolutely evidence of skill, if you understand the distribution from which they're drawn. Elon's track record is very, very far outside the null hypothesis of that distribution.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#425

Post by zmmmmm »

rolenthedeep wrote: post #380
zmmmmm wrote: post #369

Seems to me the biggest challenge for Mastodon is that the most high profile Twitter users explicitly want the centralisation it provides. They are going there literally to get on a sandbox and propagate their messages to as many millions of followers as they can. They will not understand the theoretical possibility of federation - they will see anything that introduces any kind of barrier or complexity in the way of…

Mastodon isn't trying to replace Twitter.

yes .... good point - which makes it all the more unlikely to succeed in meeting people's expectations.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#426

Post by georgeg23 »

mjr00 wrote: post #403
toss1 wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If so, he's doing an absolutely fabulous job of trashing his reputation inside of a week. Musk can be great when he does his homework and first principles analysis. It is obvious he hasn't done it here. Having advertisers take a huge step back because they seek minimal uncertainty and you spend the entire week maximizing uncertainty is bad (& shows incompetence). Having advertisers drop campaigns literally in the mid…

I agree that his approach is odd, to say the least. But Elon is clearly marketing himself as part of a counter-culture movement that's opposed to the current dominant neoliberal/corporate zeitgeist (but isn't quite alt-right). It's extremely deliberate. Whether or not it's a good idea remains to be seen. Certainly in the short term it hasn't been.

Yes he needs to curry favors with Republicans to get the big DoD contracts for:

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#427

Post by pixl97 »

phpisthebest wrote: post #412
frereubu wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies do care what their ads appear alongside, because of the outrage tweets and because, en masse, people / the media aren't mature enough to separate ad space and user-generated content.

No a very loud, very vocal, minority of users that have an extreme authoritarian world view and will create the appearance of wide scale social outrage where there is none will scare marketers.. Of course if they had any real data on the impact of their ads they probally will realize that none of the ads are effective anyway. I have never once saw a twitter ad for a large national fast food place, or a car company an…

Pray tell, before the internet how many effective boycotts were there in media, are you suggesting this never existed?

The vocal minority has always had the largest impact in all history, that's just how humans work. And even sometimes the vocal minority is correct and the moderate masses say "Oh, yea, you're right megacorp does suck and should probably change".

Simply put there are a number of relatively high view sites that don't have what we would consider reputable advertisers because those advertisers don't agree with the message of the site.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#428

Post by drstewart »

UncleEntity wrote: post #392
drstewart wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>hes lucky corporate brands and advertisers havent figured out they could start their own Mastodon instance for almost nothing, plug it until it becomes more popular than Twitter So you think the only reason that Twitter (and all social media companies) exist is because literally every other company on the planet that advertises didn't "just realize" they could "just plug" a Mastodon instance until it's more popular?…

> McDonald's, Pepsi, Audi, Coke, Nike, etc - don't have one single person that realizes this one easy trick for displacing Twitter? Why would they when there were a handful of users there? But now there’s a whole bunch of people looking for that one easy trick and whoever gives it to them gets all the marbles.

>Why would they when there were a handful of users there?

Because they could just plug it and make it the most popular social media

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#429

Post by cragfar »

smcl wrote: post #83
squidbeak wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, a businessman running some of the world's most successful companies took over a failing company and in his first week took a hatchet to a slovenly working culture and overgrown staff, and along with a practical plan to mend the company's finances and break its reliance on advertising, proposed new features (community notes, improved search, payments for creators) on an aggressive timeline that have man…

Was Twitter really failing? It finally became (extremely) profitable in 2018 and 2019 before tanking in 2020 (covid?) but it made a decent recovery in 2021: https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income...

They have all kinds of weird tax stuff going on from 2018-2020. Just ignoring taxes, they had a loss in 2020 and 2021 (2021 was mainly due to a class action lawsuit they lost for $800 million). 2022 YTD income was just barely positive in Q2 with them showing a 970 million gain from selling a company. So not really failing, but had a very uncertain future.

https://investor.twitterinc.com/financial-information/quarte...

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#430

Post by rolenthedeep »

phpisthebest wrote: post #413
rolenthedeep wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone following your old account will automatically follow the new account. The only thing that does not transfer is your post history, for mostly technical reasons. I don't know anything about pleroma, sorry. I do know that mastodon uses a ton of resources when you get a lot of users, but for <5 you can use anything including a raspberry pi

This will not happen is the Admin of the server you are one chooses to block the server you want to move to.... Mastodon has long become a political project ever sense their very public dispute with Gab... They ceased to be a neutral project and clearly showed the limitations of the federation space when it comes to putting users in control, as that control is largely symbolic and just like centralized system unless…

You're complaining that you can't migrate your account to a Nazi server.

This sounds like a feature, not a bug.

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